And on the other end of the spectrum we had Jobs era Apple, with One True God overseeing all demigods who oversee projects. IMO the things that made Apple products so successful was this structure which left no room for confusion and that the company was run by QA people. My impression of Jobs is that he was a QA guy himself.
Jobs was notoriously a capricious micromanager at NeXT; see e.g. "The NeXT Big Thing", Randall Stross.
Thanks to the secrecy that shrouds everything Apple, it's hard to get a handle on whether he became a more evolved manager (or, let's not euphemise: less of a flaming asshole) later on at Apple.
